Sport & Performance
Safety Eyewear
New Prescription Safety Glasses standards
The AS/NZS 1337.6:2007: ‘Personal eye protection – Prescription eye protectors against low and medium impact’ has defined new standards for prescription safety glasses.
Key changes to the safety glasses standard:
- No glass lenses – even if hardened – are going to meet the new standard.
- The frames, not just the lenses, must also meet certain requirements. Because of the cost of compliance testing, it is unlikely that many fashion frames will be labelled as meeting safety glass standards.
- This means that safety glasses for work will almost certainly be a separate set of spectacles to your own personal pair. (Unless of course you like walking around town with side-shields on your glasses!)
- Both the lenses and the frame will have indicators on them to enable safety authorities to check that any spectacles worn comply with impact protection standards.
If you don’t wear normally wear glasses, or if your glasses aren’t compliant with the new safety standards, then be sure to wear protective over-goggles or other approved means for any tasks requiring eye protection.
At Sharpe & Fowler, we can make prescription safety glasses to meet these new standards. Be sure to mention your safety requirements when you have your next eye examination.
Eye Health Facts
Aura, after-images and things like that.
Most of the time our vision works automatically, adjusting to changing light levels, colours and shapes and movement, without us noticing the complex task it is performing. But in certain situations so often we get a glimpse at the workings of our visual system:
- Bleaching takes place when you look at something bright - it takes a little while for the 'afterimage' to fade and vision return to normal.
- Look at an object of a bright colour for a while, and then at a white page, and you'll see an 'afterimage' in its complementary colour.
- Stare at an object of a bright colour against a blank background for a while, and because of the small movements the eye makes, this complementary colour afterimage will appear as an 'aura' at the edges of the object.